Murder at the Academy Awards (R): A Red Carpet Murder Mystery (22 page)

Of course my spiel into the camera was just being recorded on videotape. None of the things we were saying were being broadcast live. This impromptu interview would just be added to all the other material they’d taped today to be rushed back to an editing bay, to be cut by her producer, Shirl, into their final show. But who in our business would turn down a free sound bite such as the one I was dangling on the line?

“Okay,” said Devon. “Let’s go, then.” An assistant gave her a hand mike, and she smoothed down her red dress, finger-fluffed her blond hair, and turned on a most heartfelt smile, speaking directly into her camera. “We all know that Halsey Hamilton lost her battle with addiction and succumbed to a tragic accidental overdose on the night of the Oscars. And the last person to speak with Halsey got to see the wreck she had become right at the end. Let’s ask Max Taylor: what did Halsey have to say in her final seconds on earth, when the last breath was about to leave her fragile body, when she might have preferred to be with her family or loved ones or anyone of significance to her, but was instead forced to spend those last heartbreaking moments alone with you?” Then Devon turned and smiled that phony smile and held the microphone out to me.

I looked into the camera. “It’s an odd thing, Devon. When I saw how shaky Halsey appeared to be, I was shocked.” I knew I
could rattle on and say anything I liked. Later, in editing, they would cut away all the meat of context and insight and just use the shortest, sweetest bite that held the zinger. I would make sure my zinger met with her producer’s approval.

I continued, “But it was no accident that Halsey was overdosing.”

“What?” said Devon, her hand flying up to her mouth.

“Halsey was murdered. And I think you know very well who did it.”

D
evon, her eyes frantic, turned to her cameraman and shouted, “Cut. Cut it, Phil. Stop taping.”

I pointed at him and raised my voice. “Don’t you dare, Phil. Keep rolling. You’ve never seen an exclusive interview like the one you’re getting now.” I’d lost one amazing story to a guy stopping tape, I’d be a fool if I would let—

The red light suddenly flicked off. Damn it. Why, why, why?

Devon tore off her clip mike. “Let’s go.”

I raised my voice. “You knew you weren’t good enough. You lined up the interview of a lifetime, but what skills did you have? Your chemistry with Halsey? Your great reporting talent? Your own emotional depth?” I laughed a throaty laugh. “Clearly not.”

Devon spun back at me and spoke up so her assistant and Phil could hear. “I have no idea what this woman is talking about. Pack it all up. We’re through.”

“Not yet.” I grabbed her arm, but she pulled away in a little fury of resistance.

“You’re crazy, Max. Certifiable.” Breaking free, she turned her back on me and started off across the now empty grandstands and nearly deserted plaza heading toward the back entrance of the Kodak.

Phil and the assistant began packing up, pretending not to notice the scene playing out. Their paycheck depended on their getting along with Devon. How many of her tantrums had they had to endure over time?

But I would be damned if I let her pull that crap on me. “What would make your scoop even better?” I said, almost catching up with her. “Wouldn’t you be a lucky girl if Halsey had a little relapse right on-camera during your interview? Is that what you thought?” I reached out and caught her wrist and, this time, held it tight.

“Max, please.” Her voice had become suddenly low and reasonable. “Let go.”

Right there, at the very spot where the Oscar telecast had been broadcast a few days earlier, I was struck by the enormity of this crime. Not only had a young talented girl been murdered, but her reputation had been murdered as well. From now on, Halsey Hamilton would be the name of the girl who destroyed herself with drugs. I thought of all the people who knew Halsey, from the millions of girls who adored her to the cynical world of showbiz that had depended on her. Before a dozen lawyers and a
fleet of public relations reps and a thousand reporters and tabloids spun every ounce of reality out of Halsey’s story, I aimed to get the truth out of Devon. My nails dug deeper into her bare arm, making marks in her sprayed-on tan. Good.

She was trapped. If she pulled any harder, we’d be in a full-on brawl, just the sort of scene she wanted to avoid in front of the few remaining journalists wrapping up. She noticed my Hermès bag—so large, I might just be able to knock her out with it if I had to—and stopped squirming. “What the hell do you want from me?” she said.

“You murdered Halsey.”

“Look.” Her eyes were darting, aware that one or two people were looking in our direction. “It’s not what you think. I’ll tell you everything. I will. But not here. Let’s go inside.” She indicated a door on the exterior of the theatre building a few feet away. I nodded, and, leading her by her arm, I walked her over to the door, where we awkwardly made it inside. We were backstage at the Kodak, the funeral service in progress, and a stagehand walking past seemed to recognize us at once. Max Taylor and Devon Jones. Why wouldn’t we be backstage at Halsey’s funeral?

“You ladies need any help?” he asked tentatively.

Devon gave her bright smile. “No, no. We’re fine.” She turned to me and whispered, “I’ve got a lot to tell you, Max. A lot. But let’s do this in privacy, right?”

A backstage speaker allowed us to hear the in-progress service, which was taking place on the massive stage off to the right. Britney Spears was reading from scripture.

It would be hard to carry on a conversation so close to the
stage, so I nodded and pushed her along toward the back of the darkened area off stage left and through a door that led into a long, wide hallway. It ran behind the stage for sixty feet. But my hand was getting tired. Any minute Devon might realize she was actually strong enough to pull free.

From the hallway speaker, we heard Britney begin to sing “Amazing Grace.” I indicated a doorway near us and whispered, “In there.” Still holding her by the forearm, I pushed her inside ahead of me.

Three sinks, a large mirror, three stalls, all with their doors half-open. The ladies’ room was empty.

I kept my voice steady. “What did you do to her, Devon? Send her a bottle of something…Perrier? Diet Coke? You drugged it, didn’t you? And sent it to her house or…” I remembered the trash we found in the Hummer. “It was the Voss water,” I said, suddenly certain. “And you sent it to her in the limo.”

“Stop. Okay,” Devon said, shaking free of my grip and rubbing the welt on her forearm. “Jesus! Look what you did.”

“Talk to me, Devon. Explain it to me so I understand. Otherwise, I’ll run outside and make such a noise the entire funeral will hear me. You won’t get far.”

Devon’s eyes looked past me over to the door and then back. “Don’t do that. Come on. Calm down.”

“You want calm? Then tell me what happened. You sent the drugged water to Halsey’s limo. Did you put a cute little bow on it?”

“I always send gifts to my stars. They expect it. I sent her a gift package with some chocolate-covered strawberries and a wheel of Brie, and a big bottle of her favorite water. That was respectful, right? For a girl who just got out of rehab?”

I stared at her. Was she mocking the girl she had killed?

Devon smiled. “Oh, you are
so
superior. But come on. That girl was a train wreck, Max. She was already dead. If it hadn’t happened at the Oscars, it would have been some other time soon.”

“I see.” I closed my eyes for a second, sickened at her staggering justification. “If she was going to die anyway, why not on your show?”

What had Devon put in that water bottle? It couldn’t have been vodka—Halsey would have tasted it. But perhaps, if a capsule had been opened and the contents didn’t have a bitter taste…maybe the muscle relaxants Halsey used to take in her wilder days? I looked at Devon. “Was it Soma? For heaven’s sake, how many pills did you put in that bottle of water?”

“I wrenched my back after two miserable days, up on a rooftop, covering the birth of J. Lo’s twins. But I had to keep working, didn’t I? Back then, my doctor prescribed Soma. And lucky me, I had eighteen pills left.” Devon turned from me and looked at herself in the huge wall mirror above the sinks. She smiled at her reflection and touched the side of her mouth, patting a tiny speck of lipstick. “
You
know what it’s like, Max. The pressure to top your best. The chances we all take. You know. So don’t go all holy on me. You’d have done what I did. Don’t lie. You’d do it tomorrow if you thought you could hold on to your gig at Glam.”

“You and I,” I said firmly, “are two completely different people. One of us is human.”

“Look, she’s the one who broke our deal. Why didn’t she talk to
me
on the red carpet?” She shrugged at herself in the mirror.

“Halsey was a nineteen-year-old kid,” I said. “Who knows
why? She had been working like a dog for the past nine years. Teenagers rebel.” And growing up under the grip of a manager/parent who forgets the second part of the job description can’t have been easy.

My heart felt sick. After Halsey’s fight with Jimmy, she must have gotten into the limo to the Oscars, found the bottle of Voss, and, upset and alone, just drank it down. Hey, it was only bottled water. By the time she arrived on the red carpet, she was seriously ill. She never even knew what was happening to her.

Devon shook her hair, the blond tufts keeping their bounce as only good on-camera hair can, but then she frowned into the mirror and watched as the lines on each side of her mouth cracked her thickly applied makeup. She turned to me and snapped, “Give me your foundation.”

She was concerned with her makeup? To keep her talking, I stuck a hand into my large, black, crocodile Birkin, rummaging around for the makeup bag. “So Halsey must have finished the entire bottle of water. And she died.”

Devon held her hand out and took the tube of makeup I finally offered. “My bad luck wasn’t that she died,” she said, bitterness cracking her voice, “it was that she died on
your
show.”

I met her eyes in the mirror. I was looking at a monster.

“Don’t you see the irony here?” she confided, applying more makeup to her face as she spoke. “I paid a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Halsey’s dad out of my own pocket. You didn’t know that part, did you? An investment. A way to guarantee I got a new contract.”

I stared at her.

“Hell,” she said. “You’d do the same thing. We’re all hanging on to our jobs by our fingernails, right?”

In the mirror, her face was now flawless, her cracks patched. In her garish party dress, Devon looked like a pretty doll, a caricature, a cartoon.

Look, in life there are no free rides. Everything we gain has its price. In my career, no one ever gave me a break because they thought I was cute, or maybe they liked my legs. Please. Nobody liked my legs, damn them. I worked for everything I got. I had my comedy clubs, my specials, my fashion segments. If the Glam-TV gig evaporated, I had a hundred things I could do—write a play, do a talk show, host a telethon. I had earned my spot as a performer and writer. Not like Devon. She really only had one thing—young and perky. And that one thing was fast slipping away.

“You’ll go to prison, Devon. Or worse.”

“You think you’re so smart,” Devon said, still smiling. “You think you tricked me into revealing all my secrets, don’t you?
My big confession
. But no one will believe you. You are in much worse trouble than I am. And you don’t even know it.”

“You’re planning to kill me too? How? Because I swear, I’m not drinking anything.”

“Very funny, Max. Your trademark humor. Well, ha fucking ha.”

I edged closer to the door, ready to make my move.

“I’m not going to kill you, you moron. I’ve got something even worse in mind. I’m going to kill your career. Yes, even better. The lead story on
Entertainment Tonight:
Max Taylor and her stupid daughter, Drew, and their wicked plot to poison Halsey Hamilton.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Well, ask yourself, Max—who stood to gain the most from
Halsey’s death? Who was it that got that last, fatal interview? It was you.”

“Ridiculous.”

“And your slutty daughter, Drew, and Halsey had a rivalry, a bitter rivalry. Even more motive.”

What was she talking about? Halsey and Drew were friends. “You’re sick.”

“Am I? Well, maybe you don’t know as much as you think you do. Once upon a time, Halsey was in love with Burke Norris. Back when she was seventeen. Did you know that?”

I didn’t. Could that be true?

“Not common knowledge. After all, she was underage, and he was twenty-seven. Only their closest friends knew about them. A friend who needed money, I’m afraid, came to me with the story. I was just about to break it back then, exclusive, but then Halsey’s dad, Jimmy, came to me and paid me even more money to bury it. Isn’t that how we all make a little extra money?”

“Not me,” I said, disgusted. So she was also a blackmailer. Perfect.

Devon said, “Back in the day, Burke was getting his little girlfriend, Halsey, high on all sorts of pills. A mature man and an underage girl with an image to protect for her next Disney release?”

“I don’t believe you.”

“No, you wouldn’t.” Devon shook her head at me. “But ask Burke. He sold me his life story.” She smiled. “Exclusive, kiddo. The whole tawdry mess. Including how your daughter, Drew, came along while Burke was still with Halsey and swept him off his feet.”

“Shut up. This has nothing to do with my…leave her out of it.”

“When I break the news tonight that you and Drew murdered Halsey at the Academy Awards, imagine my numbers, Max! Through the roof! Burke and Drew had just broken off their engagement. Why? Because he was getting back together with Halsey. He was seen visiting Halsey again in rehab. It all adds up. Drew despised Halsey and wanted her dead. And you were just desperate enough to help her poison Halsey. Quite a story. America will love it.”

“But it’s impossible.”

Devon looked at me in amusement. “You didn’t know? Well, why would a daughter tell her mother she had just stolen a man from one of her little girlfriends? It would make that daughter seem like a…what is the term I want?…a tramp? A despicable lowlife? A two-timing bitch?”

I had suspected there was more to Burke’s past with Halsey. But I had the story switched. They had dated before he took up with Drew.

Devon loved it. “When Burke left Halsey, she went wild. Burke said it was messy. Suicide notes, even an attempt that got hushed up because she was a kid. Halsey never forgave Drew after that. She just partied harder. If that’s possible. And you know the rest.”

“We’ll sue.”

“And what about the fact that your daughter was running drugs across the border with her fiancé? Soma, wasn’t it? That’s the tip I got from my friend in the DEA. Now the story really gets good. You used those drugs to kill Halsey and get the biggest story of your career. The way I’ll spin it, even your boyfriend, Sir Gala
had, will believe me. I’ll destroy your reputation forever and send your daughter to prison.”

I was stunned into silence. Would people really believe Devon’s lies? I knew how scandal worked. If she went on the air with those allegations, even if she protected herself from litigation in a cloud of insinuations and hints, our good names would be smeared. How many would believe our version? It would be a long and ugly road.

“So,” Devon said, shrugging her thin shoulders, “It will be your word against mine. Sure, I killed Halsey Hamilton. But you don’t have one shred of evidence that links me to her murder. Who’s going to believe you?”

I walked to the ladies’ room door, opened my Birkin bag, and pulled out a palm-size object. Unja’s small Sony camcorder sat in my hand. When I got the cosmetics Devon wanted, I had pushed the right button. Thank God. To my relief, it still had plenty of space on the tape and it had patiently recorded every word.